a few years will open the eyes of the deluded
rate-payers. Anything that opens the eyes of
the apathetic tax-payers may be regarded as of
some value; and as we are inclined to take the
existing five-and-twenty miles of intercepting
tunnel as a great accomplished fact, we may
be pardoned for giving a few details about the
work, and its position.

On the north side of the river Thames, the
high level sewer, or girdle, begins at Hampstead
wilh a tunnel four feet in diameter, and
extends, increasing here and there in size, until it
reaches something like eleven feet square at
the point where it joins the river Lea at Old
Ford. Its course may be roughly described as
passing over the Highgate road, across the
fields into and down the Holloway road, under
the Great Northern railway and New River cut
to Stoke Newington, and then through Hackney
and the Victoria Park to its aqueduct across the
river Lea. It has just been completed, forming
a roundabout tunnel nine miles long, and
swallowing up in its course that open part of the
Hackney brook, which may have been a river in
the time of the Romans, but which was
decidedly a ditch sewer in the days of Queen
Victoria. Half a million cubic yards of earth have
been dug out, to form the channel of this high
level sewer; it has sucked up forty millions
of bricks, two hundred thousand bushels of
Portland cement, three hundred and fifty
thousand bushels of lime, one hundred thousand
cubic yards of concrete, and seventeen tons of
hoop iron; and has employed fifteen hundred men
from week to week. During the time of its
construction we have had the wettest summer and
the coldest winter on modern record, and bricks
have advanced in price at least fifty per cent.

With the exception of a large branch, or
"storm overflow," tunnel, which has been
constructed across Hyde Park and Kensington
Gardens, to relieve the great Ranelagh sewer
from floods, and give it another outlet into the
Thames, these are the only new works on the
north side that may be put down as no longer
existing merely on paper. The great middle
level sewer has certainly been begun at both ends,
namely, at the Old Ford part of the river Lea
and at Bayswater; but, as it will have to pass
through crowded thoroughfares, the contractors,
Messrs. Brassey, are waiting until they are
prepared to carry on the work with the utmost
expedition. It will have three branches, called
the Piccadilly, Dover-street, and Coppice-row
branches. The main line begins in an
egg-shaped tunnel, about four feet in height, and
is to increase in size, here and there, until
it ends in a circular tunnel ten feet and a half
in diameter. Its course will be from
Paddington to Notting-hill, along Oxford-street,
through Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell, along
Old-street—one of the finest old Roman roads in
London—across Shoreditch, through Bethnal
Green (still keeping very much to the line of the
old Roman road), and under the Regent's Canal,
to Old Ford, where it will run for some little
distance side by side with the high level sewer.
It has been estimated that about half a million
cubic yards of earth will have to be dug out
for this channel, and that it will suck up about
five thousand cubic yards of concrete, and
forty millions of bricks. The number of workmen
employed in it will be at least a thousand.

You could ride for miles on horseback up
either of these tunnels—the high level and the
middle level sewers—going in at the lower end,
where they run together for some distance under
a raised clay and concrete embankment. In
case of floods, they are provided with what are
called "overflow chambers," a kind of gigantic
letter-box, open at the top, built up at the sides,
or in the centre of the sewers, where they join
their channels together. These hollow chambers
reach to within a few feet of the roof, and
if the black underground stream rises above
their edges, it will pour down them, as through
a funnel, into two lower channels, thence into
the river Lea, and by that stream into the
Thames above Blackwall.

At Old Ford, where these two sewers run
together, traditions and traces of the Romans may
be found in any quantity. The workmen have
picked up decayed skulls, broken pieces of huge
pottery, singular-looking iron instruments,
fossil shells, and some early English and
Roman coins. If these relics were really planted
to be dug up by the men, and sold to the
contractors or the public, as a recent trial about
like relics found at a like spot would seem to
show, it is almost a pity that any one should ever
expose the deception. The relics are sufficiently
old and crumbled to make any ordinary
collector happy, or to attain an honoured position
under the glass-cases of a museum. The coins
are undoubted pieces of ancient money, and their
presence in the stream is accounted for by the
pleasing tradition that they were dropped by
careless Roman passengers out of a Roman punt
at the time when Old Ford was a Roman ferry.

The northern outfall sewer, which is only
just begun, is another part of the great
intercepting scheme existing only, at present, upon
paper. It is intended as a channel to convey
the combined stream of sewage from the river
Lea to its reservoir and outfall in the Thames at
Barking creek. This outfall sewer will be about
five miles long, and will consist for about one mile
of two lines of tunnel enclosed in a raised
embankment, and for the remaining distance of
four miles of three lines of tunnel, each nine
feet in diameter. It will cross over seven
streams, including the river Lea; it will pass
under the Eastern Counties Railway, and over
the North Woolwich and Tilbury and Southend
lines in aqueducts. It is estimated that about
one million one hundred and twenty-four thousand
cubic yards of peat and soft ground will
have to be cut out and piled up, to form the
embankment; that six hundred and twenty-nine
thousand cubic yards of concrete will be
required for the same purpose; that the tunnels
will suck up about twenty-seven thousand rods
of reduced brickwork, one hundred and twenty
millions of bricks, one million six hundred and